"What are you doing now?” he asked. “Do you keep a journal?" "So I make my first entry to-day."
In this way did Henry David Thoreau begin his journal, on the 22 October 1837, when he was still a young man of twenty-two years.

“What are you doing now?” I ask? “Do you keep a blog?” So I make my first entry today, not as a young man of twenty-two, but as an older man nearing the end of a sixth decade. My beard grays, but I have yet a few things to say and learn.

13 July 2014

Queen for a Day

One of the TV programs I recall watching when I was quite
young was Queen for a Day. On this
show, hosted by Jack Bailey, the women-contestants would be asked to recount publically
their sordid tales of misery and woe, to which the audience would be asked to respond
with applause (!) that would be measured on an applause-meter. The woman whose
story inspired the greatest applause would be named “Queen for a Day,” and she
would receive as a prize just those things the absence of which her story proclaimed
as the source of her suffering. There
would always be considerable lament and weeping in the narrations. I think that
what Queen for a Day promoted was misery, and its appeal seemed to lie in the
ability to leer obscenely at the suffering and pain of others and then to enjoy
the privilege to to assess and quantify the misery presented, and to elect the woman
who had narrated the most wretched tale of woe to be Queen for a Day. Losing
contestants—those whose stories just
weren’t sufficiently depressing— would
also receive some token reward for allowing the audience to leer. Later Phil
Ochs would in a different context define the entire experience of Queen for a Day in his song “Crucifixion.”
He sang, “Tell me every detail, I've got to know it all/ And do you have a
picture of the pain?” It was the pleasure of viewing someone else’s pain that made
watching the show pleasurable.

I raise
this issue now because for some time I have been reading and thinking about
memoirs, a genre that some might say is emblematic of our time—‘our time’ being the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries. That is another issue—or
no, perhaps it is the same issue, but I am headed in another direction right
now. I think autobiographies are problematic: the truthfulness of any one of
them is dubious (see Philip Roth’s The
Facts, or Frank Kermode’s Not
Entitled, or Paul DeMan’s essay, “Autobiography as De-facement”) and so I
have been wondering that if they are not truthful, then why do we read these
texts and why they are written. Again, this is a complex problem (I think), and
one I mean to more formally pursue in the future. But I have recently finished
reading two separate memoirs: Mary Karr’s trilogy, The Liar’s Club (1995),
Cherry (2000), and Lit (2009);and Jeannette Walls’ The Glass Castle (2005).These memoirs recount the miserable
lives that each author endured, overcame and survived to narrate— gloriously, say the reviews—about their torturous experience. Both
authors as a result became instant celebrities and extremely successful
‘artists,’ and their books appeared high on the New York Times Bestseller list.

As a
result of the portrayal of the pain and suffering each author endured , she moved
into the ranks of the rich and famous. That is, both Mary Karr and Jeannette Walls
become famous by recounting the
misery of their lives; there is, it would seem, some value in emphasizing the
suffering! In recounting their pain vividly they become, as it were, queens for
the day. And I cannot now distinguish between this experience and that of old
television show that rewarded a brilliant recounting a life beset by misery and
suffering. These women are rewarded by a public hungry for tales of woe for
their tale of woe. But until the writing neither woman had much of note to
report, and their notoriety derives from their recounting of their lives and
not from any material achievement in their existences. Since neither author
engages in much psychological analysis of the lives in which the suffering
derives, there isn’t much to be learned from the accounting. It is the
spectacle of suffering that remains the attraction. And of course, it is the
misery that must be foregrounded and hence, the tale is focused and falsified
to this end. Any narrative that narrates conversation that took place twenty or
thirty years ago strains credibility. The consciousness of a thirty year old
imposed on a three year old just doesn’t bespeak an honest telling.

To my
mind the life of each author is no more nor less miserable than that of
countless others. The same, of course, is true of the memoirist Frank McCourt
whose own trilogy (Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis, and
Teacher Man) may be partly
responsible for the popularity of the form. He too offers exact transcriptions
of conversations that took place fifty years earlier! As in Queen for a Day, the narrative is
directed toward the depiction of misery, and the more miserable the better the
story!

But the
same, I think, cannot be said, say, of Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, a memoir that recounts the endurance of a
human confronted by a historical force that was designed to deny the very
humanity to which the writing offers testament. Levi’s aloneness in the camps was
not particular to him alone, nor did what he suffered stem from his eccentric familial
situation: it might be that Happy families are all alike, and that every
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but to read Anna Karenina is to observe not eccentricity but individuality.
There are motives underlying behaviors that Tolstoy meticulously studied and
explored. The novel is an exploration of a complex humanity in the face of
suffering and not merely an account of the suffering. I can be Anna during my
reading of Anna Karenina, but there
is nothing in these memoirs of misery with which I can identify or from which I
might gain insight into my own life. It is pure voyeurism in which I engage,
but I am no longer amused.

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About Me

I once ran marathons and now I live one. Once I had children and now they have me. When I am in the classroom--wherever it might be--I am always young. Once, I ran long distances but as I aged the distances decreased as the times on the road increase. I moved indoors to the spinning classes and began to practice yoga. My happy baby pose is coming along very nicely. I very much like to study and read.

This is the hope that I have for Symphony #1: though it might not contain truth or even possess meaning, it does explore themes that have consumed my life for many years now, and in the four movements, I have attempted to give to those themes some elaboration, and hope that for the reader their sound might inflame some particular stirring.